Many aspects of electronic communication, and in particular electronic commerce, is based on business documents that parties can exchange over a computer connection. A big problem in current e-Business is the variety in structure and description of business information and business documents. The absence of uniform and standardized methods for the common representation of the structure and semantics of business data has led to today's situation where there is an increasing growth of different representations of electronic business information and documents. It may not be possible to exchange business documents electronically between two business partners without previous coordination and manual mapping between different document structures and semantics. A world-wide accepted syntax for representation exists with extensible markup language (XML), but this does not solve the problem of non-uniform semantics and structure.
Some business documents are based on reusable building blocks that define the semantics of the document data. An example of a standard that defines such building blocks is the electronic business XML (ebXML) Core Components Technical Specification issued by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. This specification is also known as the ISO 15000-5 standard, and is hereafter referred to as CCTS. The CCTS is the first standard which combines all necessary aspects for human legibility and automatic machine processing so that an integrated interoperability can be guaranteed. The CCTS-based building blocks are syntax free and very flexible, because they are based on a modular concept. Business information can be assembled for all demands by reusable building blocks. “Syntax free” means that these building blocks, called Core Components or “CCs” and Business Information Entities or “BIEs”, represents only the business semantic (meaning) and can be generated in arbitrary representations, like XML, ABAP Objects or Java classes. However, the semantics described by the CCs in accordance with the CCTS do not change. This guarantees one general naming convention for the unambiguous composition of semantic information. A number of conventions within the CCTS (e.g., a naming convention) guarantee that the semantic information in each CC is unambiguous. This mechanism is comparable with the grammar and words of a naturally-spoken language, because a naturally-spoken language can also be represented in many different ways (by writing or by speech), and the semantics are always the same.
Sometimes, two enterprises that wish to transact electronic business use communication schemas that are incompatible with one another (for e.g. a CIDX Purchase Order and a RosettaNet Purchase Order). If a system generates an electronic document using a first communication schema and sends the document directly to another system that uses a different communication schema, the other system is unable to interpret the electronic document because it lacks information for mapping business data elements between different schemas. The other system may therefore use a translation infrastructure to translate electronic documents from the first communication schema format to an intermediary communication schema format and then from the intermediary communication schema format to the second communication schema format. The translation between the schemas must be made manually, and because of the complexity of the schemas not all entities will be translated. This can lead to loss of knowledge.
While the use of an ordinary intermediary schema formats is common, it may, however, have some disadvantages. Particularly, from time to time there is a need to integrate a new schema into the system. This tends to result in more and more extensions of the intermediary format. Solutions such as XML schema specific extensions may not be particularly helpful to the extent they consider a kind of extension in only one dimension. Especially extensions that consider some similar and slightly different parts must be structurally separated. Therefore, the so called one dimension extension may not be helpful for consolidating parts that are semantically the same. That is, due to structural and semantical mismatches in the different sources, the intermediary format is typically extended for the new format and, as a result, the intermediary schema continually grows and becomes more fragmented. In the end, such a situation may not offer any real advantage over creating direct mappings between the different sources.